A pastor in northern India was forced to flee his village after police detained him, his wife and three children, one of whom is 2 years old, and tortured him for sharing the Gospel.
Pastor Sanjay Kumar Bharati and his family moved more than 600 miles away from his village in Shyampur area of Uttarakhand state’s Haridwar district, Morning Star News reported, adding that police had unofficially ordered him to leave the village.
Bharati and his family were detained on June 13 on a complaint of violating COVID-19 restrictions. But as they tortured him, police only interrogated him about his conversion to Christianity and his preaching of the Gospel.
“As soon as I was taken inside the police station, a policeman slapped me three or four times on my face and punched me in my stomach,” the pastor was quoted as saying. “He hurled curses and accused me of alluring people and converting them.”....

Bombay High Court has expressed “great respect” for the work done by Indian Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, who died in custody on July 5.
The 84-year-old, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, hearing impairment and other age-related ailments, never recovered from the hardships of being confined in a jail without basic services.
Justice S.S. Shinde and Justice N.J. Jamadar of the top court in the western state of Maharashtra were hearing the late priest’s bail appeal posthumously on July 19
“We don’t have time normally, but I saw the funeral service [of Father Swamy]. It was very gracious,” Justice Shinde said. 
“He is such a wonderful person. The kind of service he has rendered to the society. We have great respect for his work. Legally, whatever is there against him is a different matter.”

The judges also tried to counter criticism of the judicial system and the National Investigation Agency (NIA), a federal anti-terror body  ....

Church member apparently pressured into giving false statement.
Hard-line Hindus in northern India who attacked a young Christian woman have filed fabricated charges against her father – basing their case on testimony from a Christian relative apparently pressured into giving a false statement, sources said.
The father, Shriram Gautam, was charged with outraging the modesty of a woman and other baseless accusations after he rushed out of his house on May 24 to rescue his daughter from hard-line Hindus in Mansura village, Kanpur District, Uttar Pradesh state. The drunken Hindus had attacked 23-year-old Anamika Gautam with lathis (bamboo clubs bound with iron) and steel rods, vowing to publicly humiliate and beat her and her father to death, she said.
“They told me that I belong to a family which carries out forced conversions, and that they do not have any respect for such ....

Newly appointed president of the Tamil Nadu unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), K. Annamalai, has said he can bring the “media in the state under control within six months”, news reports said.
Annamalai made the statements on July 14, Wednesday, while addressing party workers during a road show from Coimbatore to Chennai, before taking oath as party president. He is expected to take oath on July 16 at the party headquarters in Chennai.
L. Murugan, who is now minister of state for information and broadcasting, would take care of all the media, he said.
Tamil Nadu information technology minister Mano Thangaraj told The Hindu, “His statement is an intimidating one. It is highly condemnable…I see this [Mr. Annamalai’s remarks] as a way of coercing the media into being favourable to one party, while the media have the responsibility to uphold freedom of expression.”
According to the daily, Annamalai said, ....

Posterity will blame the judiciary for the incarceration and unfortunate death of Father Stan Swamy
It has been 81 years since Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was first published. The novel is set in the backdrop of the Great Purge of the late 1930s in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This period was marked by, among other things, political repression, police surveillance, general suspicion of the opposition, imprisonment, and executions. Decades on, thousands of miles away, darkness fell at noon in India too, when Father Stan Swamy passed away at a private hospital in Mumbai on July 5. Ominously reminiscent of the macabre world Koestler had drawn, Fr. Swamy’s death is much more than the death of an activist accused of terrorist activities. It is the result of a systemic abuse of majoritarian authority and disregard for the rule of law.....

Pastor Vinod Kumar was murdered after discussing the Christian faith with his attacker
Police in the northern Indian state of Haryana have arrested a Hindu man for killing a pastor last week.
Sonu Kashyap, who was recently released from jail, attacked Pastor Vinod Kumar with a wooden roof truss in Sangoi village in Karnal district on June 30, according to Morning Star News, a persecution watchdog. 
Sources said the pastor was killed for sharing the "love and forgiveness of Christ" with his attacker.
“We came to know about the incident through local people. The news is very shocking and a matter of concern for all of us. It was never heard here of people killing in the name of faith,” Samuel Masih, a member of the Church of Ascension in Karnal, told UCA News.
“The man who allegedly killed the pastor was arrested by local people and handed over to the police on the spot and the matter is under investigation.” ...